Text-Enabled Landline and Toll Free Numbers

Canada

Impact Mobile currently offers the most reliable carrier-approved application-to-person (A2P) solution for text-enabled landlines and toll free numbers in Canada.

Grey Market Messaging: A number of wireless carriers in Canada consider traffic exchanged from businesses to consumers over 10 digit numbers to be “grey market” messaging because they are leveraging technology designed for peer-to-peer (P2P) communication, not A2P. As a result, some tier 1 carriers are aggressively filtering these types of grey market messages, which reduces the reliability of message delivery.

The Solution: The solution is to move from grey market services to either short codes or Impact Mobile’s new long code solution. The decision between short codes and long codes is largely dependent upon the type of program being run.

Approved Long Code Program Types: Long codes can be used when the overall use-case combines text messaging with voice services on the same number. The allowable use cases are as follows:

Contact center (human-to-human) chat

Ad tracking / Click-to-text or call

Technician / Driver / Package Notifications that could result in a voice call back

Short Code Use Cases: For all other business-to-consumer traffic, short codes must be used.

Advantages of legitimate long codes versus grey market long codes

Reliability: Legitimate long code traffic flows over the A2P gateway and is subject to far less spam filtering and blocking. It enjoys the same reliability that short codes do today.

Throughput: Throughput of grey market long codes for MT’s (mobile terminated / outbound messages) can often require 100’s or even 1000’s of long codes strung together to support high throughput. By contrast, legitimate long code traffic has the same throughput as short codes, which can be hundreds of times better than a grey market long code

Measurability: Delivery receipts are supported for legitimate long code traffic, so delivery rates can be measured, and invalid and ported numbers can be pruned appropriately. This is not possible with grey market long codes.

U.S.

Impact Mobile provides very competitive business-to-consumer (A2P) messaging services for clients on short codes as well as landlines and toll free numbers.

International

Many countries outside of North America use long codes as opposed to short codes for business-to-consumer traffic. Impact Mobile’s direct partnerships with multiple tier 1 international SMS aggregators enables competitive rates and a global reach.

Putting Long Codes to Use

Text-enabling long codes allow companies to provide their customers with the option of contacting them by voice or text. Once the decision has been made to text-enable a long code, Impact Mobile provides a number of solutions to manage the traffic and engage customers.

Recommended for a company with technical expertise, that wants to build their own application to receive, process and respond to SMS messages, in accordance with the permitted use-cases for Long Codes.